The Cheney Family Mess

“We were as close as sisters can be,” recalled Mary Cheney of her relationship with her older sister, Liz.
But now, a feud between the two has spilled into public view, involving social media, an angry same-sex spouse, a high-profile election and a father who feels uncomfortably caught between his two children.

The situation has deteriorated so much that the two sisters have not spoken since the summer, and the quarrel threatens to get in the way of something former Vice President Dick Cheney desperately wants — a United States Senate seat for Liz.

Things erupted on Sunday when Mary Cheney, a lesbian, and her wife were at home watching “Fox News Sunday” — their usual weekend ritual. Liz Cheney appeared on the show and said that she opposed same-sex marriage, describing it as “just an area where we disagree,” referring to her sister. Taken aback and hurt, Mary Cheney took to her Facebook page to blast back: “Liz — this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree you’re just wrong — and on the wrong side of history.”

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Liz Cheney on Sunday declined to directly address the remarks from her sister and sister-in-law, but said in an email: “I love my sister and her family and have always tried to be compassionate towards them. I believe that is the Christian way to behave.”

People who have spoken to Liz Cheney say she is irritated that her sister is making their dispute public and believes it is hypocritical for Mary Cheney to take such a hard line now, given that she worked for the re-election of President Bush, an opponent of same-sex marriage.

It’s impossible to say what’s really going on inside this family. It could be that Liz Cheney always had a problem with her sister’s lesbian relationship, but kept quiet out of respect. Or it could be that Liz Cheney is throwing her sister and her sister’s wife under the bus out of political opportunism. Certainly it is arguable that Mary Cheney put her gay-rights principles on the back burner for the sake of re-electing President Bush.

This case does raise sensitive and painful questions for families: What is the correct way to think of, and to relate to, one’s same-sex family members? If one is gay, how much grace and tolerance should one give to one’s relatives when they cannot fully accept one’s same-sex relationship?

It’s an area fraught with complexity and tension. It’s easy to say, “It’s our way or the highway,” because that has the advantage of moral clarity. But it’s also inhuman. On the other hand, it’s also inhuman for conservative family members to expect gay family members to accept scorn and rejection as the cost for being a member of the family.

If I were gay and partnered, what would I expect? I don’t think I would expect my family to fully endorse my sexuality and my partnership. It would be appreciated if they could, but given how conservative many of them are, I think it’s unrealistic to expect that — especially if they were religious. On the other hand, I would expect them to treat my partner and me with respect at family get-togethers — which includes not gossiping behind our backs. If they couldn’t do that, then we wouldn’t see them. But I don’t think it would be unfair of them to expect me to meet them halfway in terms of tolerance. This issue is hard for most people, gay and straight.

Interestingly, I think I would be less willing to meet them halfway if I were married to a person of another race, and I had family members who rejected her, or us as a couple, because of that. That’s because I can understand Christians in good faith not being able to endorse same-sex marriage or homosexual behavior — I am one of those Christians — but I cannot see any moral grounds in Christianity for viewing race in the same way.

In either case, if my family were unwelcoming or rude to my spouse, same-sex or of another race, they would not see me either. I know where my primary loyalties lie.

It is hard for me to imagine rejecting my children based on their sexual orientation, even if they were to partner with someone of their own sex. I would commit myself to working through it, and would hope that they would recognize that I don’t hold the views I do out of prejudice, but out of sincere Christian faith, a faith that I am not ashamed of, and will not deny. My hope and my prayer would be that the love we would have for each other — a love that I could foresee extending to their partner — would hold us together, despite our differences. Maybe that’s utopian, I don’t know.

The problem here, I think, is this: what is identity? Is sexual desire and emotional orientation at the core of one’s identity, or ancillary to it? To what extent is having one’s sexuality rejected the same as having one’s personality rejected? And, is religious conviction at the core of one’s identity, or ancillary to it? To what extent is having one’s religious convictions rejected the same as having one’s personality rejected?

What do you think? Let’s keep this discussion civil.

UPDATE: I didn’t allow this comment from “Ben” to go up, but I post it here as an example of the kind of conservative I don’t want to be:

With “loving, tolerant” conservative pussys like you, I know the future is lost.

Maybe. But I’d rather not have the future determined by people like this tool.

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330 Responses to The Cheney Family Mess

“The spread of AIDS was initially accelerated by gay male promiscuity (and the bigoted, spineless failure of leadership of the Reagan Administration)”

I’ve never understood this one — what was Reagan supposed to do, say, Hey Rock, you think maybe you should stop cruising West Hollywood?

” Today, on a global perspective, the average person being infected with HIV is an African woman getting it through heterosexual intercourse, usually her husband.”

Uh, probably not. People who, you know, have done actual research estimate around 30-35% of male HIV transmission in Africa is due to heterosexual sex (of all kinds and with all kinds). The figure is 29% among women.

“Now M_Young repeatedly insists that gay sex, because it damages tissues not designed for this sort of penetration, increases the chances of transmission. That may be true — although TTT is entirely correct about the many “deviations” that heterosexuals have indulged throughout human history.”

No Siarlys, it is definitely true. In fact, being the ‘active’ partner in anal sex is more risky — and I am only considering HIV here — than vaginal sex is for a woman.

“Researchers from Imperial College and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine did a meta-analysis of 16 studies related to HIV risk during unprotected anal sex. Most of the studies involved gay or bisexual men. (Our friends at NAM recently summarized the findings in detail.) They estimated that HIV transmission risk during a single act of unprotected, receptive anal sex may be 18 times higher than unprotected, receptive vaginal sex: 1.4 percent compared to 0.08 percent. The estimated risk for unprotected, insertive anal sex was, as expected, found to be lower (0.62 percent) than for receptive anal sex — and lower still if the man is circumcised (0.11 percent). Still, the risk percentages are all higher for anal sex than vaginal sex, which is in line with earlier study findings.”

My advice to any heterosexuals engaging in this practice — stop! Ditto for homosexuals.

I don’t bring up all this unpleasantness to be, uh, unpleasant. I bring it up because it shows that the traditional stigmatization of homosexual activity had a sound reason behind it. It still does, in that there are a huge number of people who are in the middle of the (highly skewed) sexual continuum who would be better off going straight rather than ‘gay’. And society would be better off for it.

Re: the common practice for the majority of people was monogamous marriage.

Who was keeping all those ladies of the evening in business? Prostitution (almost always legal pre-1900) did a roaring business in the past. To be sure, a lot of it was due to young men not yet married, since men waited until they were reasonably established to marry. But there were not a few husbands who found their wives tiresome or otherwise unavailable (pregnant, etc.) who also patronized the local bawdy house.

“Your son’s gay partner is the equivalent of a drug dealer? A corrupt business partner? A criminal? Because he is gay?’

It depends whether they lively chastely or not. If my son had a same-sex partner whom used him for his sexual satisfaction, that would be logically comparable to a drug dealer, because hurting the soul is no better than hurting the body.

Whether it is worse or not would depend on many factors. For instance, when people don’t know what they are doing (as is the case for many people today in the sexual realm), their moral culpability is greatly diminished.

But there also people who deal drugs out of desperation, because they are addicts themselves etc. Who am I to judge?

what was Reagan supposed to do, say, Hey Rock, you think maybe you should stop cruising West Hollywood?

Reagan was supposed to oversee press releases, health warnings, new funding and reprioritization of HHS and CDC research. Acknowledge the problem and use America’s greatest-in-history resources of medical science to start aggressively confronting a new sexually-transmitted disease as soon as it was published in 1981. Instead of doing utterly nothing for half a decade. Oh, and his government also completely left the hemophiliac / blood disorder community to die en masse because they were just so icked-out by everything gay that they didn’t even think of what was being done to the nation’s stored blood supplies, let alone speak of it or pass guidelines. If you look at how that administration responded to the first outbreak and identification of Legionnaires Disease, or cases of tampering with bottles of aspirin, then his emasculated and cowardly silence is all the more damning. It very well might not have been possible to develop therapies any faster than we actually did, but we absolutely could have made transmissions plummet.

No, because the were not being discriminated against on the basis of their choice of partners or their real or perceived sexual acts. Socially dominant populations do not need legal protections as they generally are the ones to define “legal.

I cannot figure how you got the idea into your head that enthusiasts of oral sex (pretty unusual among my parents’ contemporaries) constitute a ‘social dominant population’. As for ‘discriminated against’, that is what is otherwise known as ‘exercising one’s right of free association’. There are all manner of personal characteristics which stand you in bad stead in workplaces and social settings. Only a select few are the occasion for collective action or for importuning politicians for official recognition. Other people take it on the chin and get on with their lives. Homosexuals fancy they are special so make pests of themselves.

The spread of AIDS was initially accelerated by gay male promiscuity (and the bigoted, spineless failure of leadership of the Reagan Administration),

I know the gay lobby maintains the fiction that they were ill-dealt with by both the Reagan Administration and the Koch Administration in New York City, but it is absolute tommyrot and you should stop trading in it.

All politicians face competing claims on available resources. Cretins like Larry Kramer fancied that their preferred cause merited some sort of domestic Marshall Plan and that it was indicative of ‘bigotry’ or whatever if the public agencies in question could not figure out in a manner of a few years how to treat a rather challenging and novel infectious illness. They were wrong.

Your son’s gay partner is the equivalent of a drug dealer? A corrupt business partner? A criminal? Because he is gay?

Do you have people with atrocious table manners who start arguments over dinner in your home? If you do not, do you regard them as the ‘equivalent of a drug dealer’? (While we are on the subject, please note that the libertarians always whinging about the ‘drug war’ are rather indulgent towards drug dealers).

<blockquote Who was keeping all those ladies of the evening in business? Prostitution (almost always legal pre-1900) did a roaring business in the past.

This is so true. Consider the Old Testament: Rahab was a prosititue who helped the Israelite at Jericho, Jephthah was the son of one, Samson slept with one, and King Solomon had something like 1,000 concubines!

Reagan was supposed to oversee press releases, health warnings, new funding and reprioritization of HHS and CDC research.

No, TTT, the president and other officials actually employ people who write press releases and (if they are good managers) do not micromanage them o’er much. The Centers for Disease Control, the components of the National Institutes of Health concerned with infectious disease, and sundry components of the Public Health Service are a quite modest share of what the federal government does. Mr. Reagan had a cabinet secretary who had several bureau chiefs tasked with these activities.

Instead of doing utterly nothing for half a decade. Oh, and his government also completely left the hemophiliac / blood disorder community to die en masse because they were just so icked-out by everything gay that they didn’t even think of what was being done to the nation’s stored blood supplies,

The fact that you were and are ignorant of public policy and public action during the period running from 1981 to 1986 does not mean that nothing was done.

For the record, it was not until the spring of 1984 that the infectious agent causing AIDS was identified by the Pasteur Institute. The testing of the blood supply began in March of 1985. Prior to that date, blood donors were handed a pamphlet asking them not to donate if they fell into certain social categories.

You have a strange definition of authoritarianism. I have said repeatedly that I expect and accept being offended in public space. We’re talking about guests in my home. Is your definition of authoritarianism really “Someone who insists upon particular behaviors in his home”?

“I’ve never quite understood why lesbians should go straight because anal sex has a higher risk factor for AIDS than penile/vaginal penetration.”

Lesbianism has been much more tolerated, traditionally, than male homosexuality. In fact, as I understand it, it is only the latter that is condemned in Leviticus, not the former. Likewise, the ancient Greeks despised what we would now call ‘gay’ men (there were elaborate rules regarding same-sex relations in their culture), but Lesbians heading to Lesbos was a okay. Even in our own culture, there was the concept of the ‘Bostonian marriage’ — sort of a don’t ask don’t tell as far as female-female relationships.

“Authoritarianism, even of small scale, finally brooks no dissent”

Hence the state going after wedding photographers in New Mexico and cake decorators in Oregon.

If you look at how that administration responded to the first outbreak and identification of Legionnaires Disease, or cases of tampering with bottles of aspirin, then his emasculated and cowardly silence is all the more damning.

The first outbreak and identification of Legionnaire’s disease occurred in 1976. Mr. Reagan was not in office at that time. Neither Legionnaire’s disease nor the cyanide infected bottles of Tylenol were matters of intense public concern for a period longer than a few weeks, neither required a lengthy and challenging research project to resolve, and neither required a tedious public education project amongst an intractable clientele. I cannot figure why your mind would draw an analogy between AIDS and these other quite small and discrete problems.

Don’t know the Cheney’s but if my Auntie Dearest or any other member of my family denounced my parents’ marriage publicly & politicized stopping legal recognition of my family; that’s a betrayal it would be very hard to forgive. I feel for Mary Cheney’s children, having an aunt like Liz.

“Other people take it on the chin and get on with their lives. Homosexuals fancy they are special so make pests of themselves.” -Art Deco

I’m not sure who these “other people” are. Most of the population is in at least one statutorily protected class. For example, religious practitioners are a statutorily protected class. Thus, one cannot be fired from a job for being an evangelical Christian.

Gay people think of ourselves as no more “special” than religious people. How does that make us “pests”?

Siarlys, AIDS never moved into the ‘general population’. It was and remained in the occidental world a disease almost entirely confined to the homosexual and junkie subcultures.

Oh? Do you have any statistics to back that up? I read in the news all the time about women and children with AIDS, wives getting AIDS from their husbands, women saying “I didn’t know you could get AIDS from heterosexual sex” (Obviously they’ve been listening to Art Deco too much for their own good).

Gay people aren’t the ones who are trying to redefine marriage. Heterosexuals redefined marriage decades ago. Gay people are merely asking that they be granted rights consistent with the redefinition.

Let go of my leg.

Oh? Do you have any statistics to back that up?

I think you can check the sites of the National Center for Health Statistics on your own for the precise contemporary numbers. The share of those infected with HIV who are outside the two major risk categories has always been in the single digits (low single digits, in fact). You have hemophiliacs, you have a few who received it from transfusions, you have a few women infected from coitus, and you have a few children of such women. Transmission is so inefficient during the course of ordinary non-deviate sexual activity that it does not spread like conventional venereal diseases. This has been well known for nearly a generation.